Kerry email

[g8trz2003]

A friend of mine sent me an email...I'm guessing she's pro-Bush, but whatever...I dont know if these are real or not...I suspect they are...but could definitely be wrong...anyway, they're quotes from Kerry's fellow soldiers from Vietnam...

 

"We resent very deeply the false war crimes charges he made coming back from Vietnam in 1971 and repeated in the book "Tour of Duty." We think those cast an aspersion on all those living and dead, from our unit and other units in Vietnam. We think that he knew he was lying when he made the charges, and we think that they're unsupportable. We intend to bring the truth about that to the American people.

 

We believe, based on our experience with him, that he is totally unfit to be the Commander-in-Chief."

 

-- John O'Neill, spokesman, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth .

"I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States. This is not a political issue. It is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty and trust -- all absolute tenets of command. His biography, 'Tour of Duty,' by Douglas Brinkley, is replete with gross exaggerations, distortions of fact, contradictions and slanderous lies. His contempt for the military and authority is evident by even a most casual review of this biography. He arrived in-country with a strong anti-Vietnam War bias and a self-serving determination to build a foundation for his political future. He was aggressive, but vain and prone to impulsive judgment, often with disregard for specific tactical assignments. He was a 'loose cannon.' In an abbreviated tour of four months and 12 days, and with his specious medals secure, Lt.(jg) Kerry bugged out and began his infamous betrayal of all United States forces in the! ! Vietnam War. That included our soldiers, our marines, our sailors, our coast guardsmen, our airmen, and our POWs. His leadership within the so-called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testimony before Congress in 1971 charging us with unspeakable atrocities remain an undocumented but nevertheless meticulous stain on the men and women who honorably stayed the course. Senator Kerry is not fit for command."

 

-- Rear Admiral Roy Hoffman, USN (retired), chairman, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth .

"During Lt.(jg) Kerry's tour, he was under my command for two or three specific operations, before his rapid exit. Trust, loyalty and judgment are the key, operative words. His turncoat performance in 1971 in his grubby shirt and his medal-tossing escapade, coupled with his slanderous lines in the recent book portraying us that served, including all POWs and MIAs, as murderous war criminals, I believe, will have a lasting effect on all military veterans and their families.

 

Kerry would be described as devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive, but the most common phrase that you'd hear is 'requires constant supervision.'"

 

-- Captain Charles Plumly, USN (retired) .

"Thirty-five years ago, many of us fell silent when we came back to the stain of sewage that Mr. Kerry had thrown on us, and all of our colleagues who served over there. I don't intend to be silent today or ever again. Our young men and women who are serving deserve no less."

 

-- Andrew Horne .

"In my specific, personal experience in both coastal and river patrols over a 12-month period, I never once saw or heard anything remotely resembling the atrocities described by Senator Kerry. If I had, it would have been my obligation to report them in writing to a higher authority, and I would certainly have done that. If Senator Kerry actually witnessed or participated in these atrocities or, as he described them, 'war crimes,' he was obligated to report them. That he did not until later when it suited his political purposes strikes me as opportunism of the worst kind. That he would malign my service and that of his fellow sailors with no regard for the truth makes him totally unqualified to serve as Commander-in-Chief."

 

-- Jeffrey Wainscott .

"I signed that letter because I, too felt a deep sense of betrayal that someone who took the same oath of loyalty as I did as an officer in the United States Navy would abandon his group here (points to group photo) to join this group here (points to VVAW protest photo), and come home and attempt to rally the American public against the effort that this group was so valiantly pursuing.

 

It is a fact that in the entire Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle. We lost the war at home ... and at home, John Kerry was the Field General."

 

-- Robert Elder .

"My daughters and my wife have read portions of the book 'Tour of Duty.' They wanted to know if I took part in the atrocities described. I do not believe the things that are described happened.

 

Let me give you an example. In Brinkley's book, on pages 170 to 171, about something called the 'Bo De massacre' on November 24th of 1968... In Kerry's description of the engagement, first he claimed there were 17 servicemen that were wounded. Three of us were wounded. I was the first..."

 

-- Joseph Ponder .

"While in Cam Rahn Bay, he trained on several 24-hour indoctrination missions, and one special skimmer operation with my most senior and trusted Lieutenant. The briefing from some members of that crew the morning after revealed that they had not received any enemy fire, and yet Lt.(jg) Kerry informed me of a wound -- he showed me a scratch on his arm and a piece of shrapnel in his hand that appeared to be from one of our own M-79s. It was later reported to me that Lt.(jg) Kerry had fired an M-79, and it had exploded off the adjacent shoreline. I do not recall being advised of any medical treatment, and probably said something like 'Forget it.' He later received a Purple Heart for that scratch, and I have no information as to how or whom.

 

Lt.(jg) Kerry was allowed to return to the good old USA after 4 months and a few days in-country, and then he proceeded to betray his former shipmates, calling them criminals who were committing atrocities. Today we are here to tell you that just the opposite is true. Our rules of engagement were quite strict, and the officers and men of Swift often did not even return fire when they were under fire if there was a possibility that innocent people -- fishermen, in a lot of cases -- might be hurt or injured. The rules and the good intentions of the men increased the possibility that we might take friendly casualties."

 

-- Commander Grant Hibbard, USN (retired) .

"Lt. Kerry returned home from the war to make some outrageous statements and allegations... of numerous criminal acts in violation of the law of war were cited by Kerry, disparaging those who had fought with honor in that conflict. Had war crimes been committed by US forces in Vietnam? Yes, but such acts were few and far between. Yet Lt. Kerry have numerous speeches and testimony before Congress inappropriately leading his audiences to believe that what was only an anomaly in the conduct of America's fighting men was an epidemic. Furthermore, he suggested that they were being encouraged to violated the law of war by those within the chain of command.

 

Very specific orders, on file at the Vietnam archives at Texas Tech University, were issued by my father [Admiral Elmo Zumwalt] and others in his chain of command instructing subordinates to act responsibly in preserving the life and property of Vietnamese civilians."

 

-- Lt. Col. James Zumwalt, USMC (retired) .

"We look at Vietnam... after all these years it is still languishing in isolated poverty and helplessness and tyranny. This is John Kerry's legacy. I deeply resent John Kerry's using his Swift boat experience, and his betrayal of those who fought there as a stepping-stone to his political ambitions."

 

-- Barnard Wolff .

"In a whole year that I spent patrolling, I didn't see anything like a war crime, an atrocity, anything like that. Time and again I saw American fighting men put themselves in graver danger trying to avoid... collateral damage.

 

When John Kerry returned to the country, he was sworn in front of Congress. And then he told my family -- my parents, my sister, my brother, my neighbors -- he told everyone I knew and everyone I'd ever know that I and my comrades had committed unspeakable atrocities."

 

-- David Wallace .

[g8trz2003]

continued...

"I served with these guys. I went on missions with them, and these men served honorably. Up and down the chain of command there was no acquiescence to atrocities. It was not condoned, it did not happen, and it was not reported to me verbally or in writing by any of these men including Lt.(jg) Kerry.

 

In 1971, '72, for almost 18 months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief. It just galls one to think about it."

 

-- Captain George Elliott, USN (retired) .

"During the Vietnam War I was Task Force Commander at An Thoi, and my tour of duty was 13 months, from the end of Tet to the beginning of the Vietnamization of the Navy units.

 

Now when I went there right after Tet, I was restricted in my movements. I couldn't go much of anyplace because the Vietcong controlled most of the area. When I left, I could go anywhere I wanted, just about. Commerce was booming, the buses were running, trucks were going, the waterways were filled with sampans with goods going to market, but yet in Kerry's biography he says that our operations were a complete failure. He also mentions a formal conference with me, to try to get more air cover and so on. That conference never happened..."

 

-- Captain Adrian Lonsdale, USCG (retired).

"I was in An Thoi from June of '68 to June of '69, covering the whole period that John Kerry was there. I operated in every river, in every canal, and every off-shore patrol area in the 4th Corps area, from Cambodia all the way around to the Bo De River. I never saw, even heard of all of these so-called atrocities and things that we were supposed to have done.

 

This is not true. We're not standing for it. We want to set the record straight."

 

-- William Shumadine.

"In 1971, when John Kerry spoke out to America, labeling all Vietnam veterans as thugs and murderers, I was shocked and almost brought to my knees, because even though I had served at the same time and same unit, I had never witnessed or participated in any of the events that the Senator had accused us of. I strongly believe that the statements made by the Senator were not only false and inaccurate, but extremely harmful to the United States' efforts in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Tragically, some veterans, scorned by the antiwar movement and their allies, retreated to a life of despair and suicide. Two of my crewmates were among them. For that there is no forgiveness. "

 

-- Richard O'Meara .

"My name is Steve Gardner. I served in 1966 and 1967 on my first tour of duty in Vietnam on Swift boats, and I did my second tour in '68 and '69, involved with John Kerry in the last 2 1/2 months of my tour. The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?"

 

-- Steven Gardner .

"I served in Vietnam as a boat officer from June of 1968 to July of 1969. My service was three months in Coastal Division 13 out of Cat Lo, and nine months with Coastal Division 11 based in An Thoi. John Kerry was in An Thoi the same time I was. I'm here today to express the anger I have harbored for over 33 years, about being accused with my fellow shipmates of war atrocities.

 

All I can say is when I leave here today, I'm going down to the Wall to tell my two crew members it's not true, and that they and the other 49 Swiftees who are on the Wall were then and are still now the best."

 

-- Robert Brant .

"I never saw, heard of, or participated in any Swift boat crews killing cattle, poisoning crops, or raping and killing civilians as charged by John Kerry, both in his book and in public statements. Since we both operated at the same time, in the same general area, and on the same missions under the same commanders, it is hard to believe his claims of atrocities and poor planning of Sea Lord missions.

 

I signed this letter because I feel that he used Swift boat sailors to proclaim his antiwar statements after the war, and now he uses the same Swift boat sailors to support his claims of being a war hero. He cannot have it both ways, and we are here to ask for full disclosure of the proof of his claims."

 

-- James Steffes

 

I'm gonna be honest. I haven't read them all yet....I'll get there though...

[MarlinFan10]

Wow, I had no idea Kerry was in Vietnam. He's been pretty queit about it. I wonder if he won anything like a purple heart, or 3???

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damn hippy... :thumbdown

[Flying_Mollusk]

Kerry has admitted he was too wild when he came back. Too young and idealistic. That doesnt take away from his heroism and the testimony of those who have served with him.

[Lcyberlina]

They have only one of his 14 crewmates trashing him. You think there may be a bias?

 

Also, did you know that the people who are trashing Kerry's record on Vietnam were the same ones who wrote beautiful letters recommending him for the medals??? hmmm I wonder what changed their minds????

 

Anyway, one has all the right to protest an unjust war.... SPECIALLY, when one actually lived it. Enough said.

[Ice Man]

Kerry, you sly devil...trying to become the president!

[FishFanPR]

They have only one of his 14 crewmates trashing him. You think there may be a bias?

 

Also, did you know that the people who are trashing Kerry's record on Vietnam were the same ones who wrote beautiful letters recommending him for the medals??? hmmm I wonder what changed their minds????

 

Anyway, one has all the right to protest an unjust war.... SPECIALLY, when one actually lived it. Enough said.

491495[/snapback]

 

Can you read??? at the time Kerry was given his Purple Medal and whatnot, he wasn't an anti-war activist. No one here is questioning Kerry's record in Vietnam....he should be respected and honored for his service...what we will question are his attempts to humiliate and attack the Vietnam war effort. His vicious and demagogue attack on truth won't be tolerated.

[Lcyberlina]

His vicious and demagogue attack on truth won't be tolerated.

491651[/snapback]

 

What truth is that? That some soldiers in Vietnam engaged in rapes, burning of villages and other war crimes? That the war in Vietnam was an absolute atrocity?

 

"How can you ask a man to the be the last one to die for a lie?"

 

Furthermore, I admire Kerry for having the guts to come out and protest the war. He earned that right.

[Flying_Mollusk]

They have only one of his 14 crewmates trashing him. You think there may be a bias?

 

Also, did you know that the people who are trashing Kerry's record on Vietnam were the same ones who wrote beautiful letters recommending him for the medals??? hmmm I wonder what changed their minds????

 

Anyway, one has all the right to protest an unjust war.... SPECIALLY, when one actually lived it. Enough said.

491495[/snapback]

 

Can you read??? at the time Kerry was given his Purple Medal and whatnot, he wasn't an anti-war activist. No one here is questioning Kerry's record in Vietnam....he should be respected and honored for his service...what we will question are his attempts to humiliate and attack the Vietnam war effort. His vicious and demagogue attack on truth won't be tolerated.

491651[/snapback]

 

1. People are questioning his service in Vietnam. Read the above posts smart guy.

 

2. He has said he was too fervent in attacking his fellow soldiers. But as someone who protested a war he didnt feel was justified, he is more of an American with you.

[FishFanPR]

They have only one of his 14 crewmates trashing him. You think there may be a bias?

 

Also, did you know that the people who are trashing Kerry's record on Vietnam were the same ones who wrote beautiful letters recommending him for the medals??? hmmm I wonder what changed their minds????

 

Anyway, one has all the right to protest an unjust war.... SPECIALLY, when one actually lived it. Enough said.

491495[/snapback]

 

Can you read??? at the time Kerry was given his Purple Medal and whatnot, he wasn't an anti-war activist. No one here is questioning Kerry's record in Vietnam....he should be respected and honored for his service...what we will question are his attempts to humiliate and attack the Vietnam war effort. His vicious and demagogue attack on truth won't be tolerated.

491651[/snapback]

 

1. People are questioning his service in Vietnam. Read the above posts smart guy.

 

2. He has said he was too fervent in attacking his fellow soldiers. But as someone who protested a war he didnt feel was justified, he is more of an American with you.

491669[/snapback]

 

I talk for FishFanPR, not for everyone else...

 

and second, what Kerry did was betray his fellow servicemen...crazy s*** went down in Nam...and that HAD to be denounced. But we must also acknowledge the fact that the American public was fueled by erroneous info. provided by biased networks/individuals, etc. Has anyone from Kerry's outfit supported his claims???

[Lcyberlina]

They have only one of his 14 crewmates trashing him. You think there may be a bias?

 

Also, did you know that the people who are trashing Kerry's record on Vietnam were the same ones who wrote beautiful letters recommending him for the medals??? hmmm I wonder what changed their minds????

 

Anyway, one has all the right to protest an unjust war.... SPECIALLY, when one actually lived it. Enough said.

491495[/snapback]

 

Can you read??? at the time Kerry was given his Purple Medal and whatnot, he wasn't an anti-war activist. No one here is questioning Kerry's record in Vietnam....he should be respected and honored for his service...what we will question are his attempts to humiliate and attack the Vietnam war effort. His vicious and demagogue attack on truth won't be tolerated.

491651[/snapback]

 

1. People are questioning his service in Vietnam. Read the above posts smart guy.

 

2. He has said he was too fervent in attacking his fellow soldiers. But as someone who protested a war he didnt feel was justified, he is more of an American with you.

491669[/snapback]

 

I talk for FishFanPR, not for everyone else...

 

and second, what Kerry did was betray his fellow servicemen...crazy s*** went down in Nam...and that HAD to be denounced. But we must also acknowledge the fact that the American public was fueled by erroneous info. provided by biased networks/individuals, etc. Has anyone from Kerry's outfit supported his claims???

491673[/snapback]

 

I think the senate foreign relations committee agreed with Kerry. Furthermore, 43% of the vietnam veterans support him now compared to Bush's 40%.

 

Many veterans are greatful that at last one of their own brings recognition to this forgotten heros. They are mainly pissed that Bush says one thing and does another. He promised to increase their benefits when he is actually cutting them.

[Flying_Mollusk]

Here, read this:

 

John Kerry and War Crimes in Vietnam

 

An outraged buzz is circulating in political circles that John Kerry is unfit to run for president because as an antiwar activist he accused Vietnam veterans of committing war crimes. In a long-simmering reaction to Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, "many critics see Mr. Kerry's words as impugning the honor of all who served in Vietnam," as the New York Times put it. This, to put it mildly, is a gross distortion of what Kerry actually said and what the war crimes hearings were about.

 

"Summarizing the accounts of American soldiers he had heard at an antiwar conference in Detroit weeks earlier, Mr. Kerry said the men told how 'they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.' " the Times reported in a February 28 retrospective on Kerry's Vietnam war protests.

 

"But Gary Solis, a former Marine lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and expert on war crimes who is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center here, said Mr. Kerry had made a grave error. 'Sure it's true,' Mr. Solis said. 'Sure there were people raped, ears cut off and so on. Each one of the things that he mentioned happened, in some cases I know, and in others I'm confident. But when you put them all together in one sentence and say this was well known at every level of command, it impugns, it seems to me, everyone who fought over there and it gives the impression that everyone who fought over there was a war criminal and that's just not true,' " the Times report concluded.

 

What the national news media has not reported in the current controversy - just as was not widely reported in 1971 - are the crimes of war that Kerry summarized in his antiwar speech to Congress. When it comes to war crimes, the news world seems to prefer quoting opinions rather than presenting facts.

 

The fact is that the testimony on war crimes presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, Michigan, was read into the Congressional Record, spurred Congressional hearings into the conduct of the war in Vietnam, and echoed the conclusions of Brigadier General Telford Taylor, who prosecuted Nazi war criminals after World War II, that in Vietnam "we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today's American tragedy" (Nuremberg and Vietnam, 1970).

 

The hearings in Detroit, called the Winter Soldier Investigation, were designed to counter what many veterans saw as government officials scapegoating GIs for the widespread death and destruction of civilians and villages in Vietnam. "This group's efforts to document such testimony followed the well-known 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. By the 1971 VVAW hearings, the trial of Lt. William L. Calley by the Army was planned. The 1968 My Lai incident clearly resulted in more antiwar sentiment here in the United States, including these efforts of Vietnam veterans to describe vividly their personal experiences," University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt stated in a 1999 essay on the war crimes hearings.

 

"The Winter Soldier Investigation is not a mock trial. There will be no phony indictments; there will be no verdict against Uncle Sam," William Crandall, a former infantry platoon leader in the Americal Division in Vietnam, said in the event's introduction. "In these three days, over a hundred Vietnam veterans will present straightforward testimony - direct testimony - about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy. The vets will testify in panels arranged by the combat units in which they fought so that it will be easy to see the policy of each division and thus the larger policy."

 

"We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lt. William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide . . . We are here to bear witness not against America, but against those policy makers who are perverting America."

 

In a closing statement, Donald Duncan, a former Army Special Forces master sergeant, said "We have presented testimony for three days covering a wide range of war crimes. We have covered a period by actual firsthand testimony from 1963 to 1970 - seven years. We find: that in 1963, we were displacing population, we were murdering prisoners, we were turning prisoners over to somebody else to be tortured. We were committing murder then, and in 1970 we find nothing has changed. Every law of Land Warfare has been violated and been testified to here in the past three days. It has been done systematically, deliberately, and continuously. It has been done with the full knowledge of those who, in fact, make policy for this country. No active step has ever been taken to curtain those acts in Vietnam"

 

"We built forts in Vietnam to protect villages, or so we told the Vietnamese. And at the first shot fired at Tet in 1968 we destroyed the villages to protect the fort. District Eight in Saigon was leveled brick by brick, to the ground, to secure an area where Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and Catholics, had come to the south because that was something the Church had told them in 1954. We leveled that area to protect a bridge," Duncan said. "We have listened to some terrible stories here. We have found there are some wondrous ways indeed to inflict pain upon each other. We will call them atrocities, and we will call them war crimes. And to talk about those acts, I'm sure, has been almost as painful for those who have had to listen as for those who have talked about them."

 

In his testimony to Congress, Kerry went on to say: "We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals."

 

"Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese... Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake," Kerry said, emphasizing his call for supporting the troops by bringing them home from a hell of our creation. "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' "

 

"We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say."

 

Shortly after Kerry's testimony, hearings on war crimes in Vietnam were held by an ad hoc committee chaired by Rep. Ronald Dellums of California. In summing up four days of testimony by West Point officers, pilots, POW interrogators,and infantrymen who served in various units in Vietnam, Dellums said: "My hope is no other young person will have to go through the same kind of evil, the same kind of insanity, the same kind of wanton death and destruction that you have been engaged in."

 

More than three decades later, in 2003 the Toledo Blade, a small daily newspaper in Ohio, published an expose on war crimes committed in Vietnam that military officials investigated and then covered up. "The records related to a four-and-a-half year government investigation into the actions of a platoon of soldiers from the elite 101st Airborne known as Tiger Force who allegedly killed and mutilated dozens of Vietnamese civilians during a seven-month period in 1967."

 

"The investigation apparently concluded that at least 18 soldiers committed war crimes . . . but nothing was ever publicly disclosed, no charges were filed, and the documents have remained classified since 1975. The Blade's investigation, adding to the military's findings, and based on interviews with Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, concluded that the unit killed hundreds of unarmed people," Editor & Publisher magazine noted.

 

"Many readers of a recent series revealing alleged war crimes in Vietnam 36 years ago must have wondered: Why now? And why in The Blade of Toledo, Ohio? It seems more like a New York Times or Washington Post kind of project," the Editor & Publisher writer wrote. But the national news media skirted covering crimes of war while GIs slogged through mud and blood in Vietnam, and it still skirts the reality of war today.

 

Yet in one corner of Ohio, and in many homes in America, the bitter reality of the war in Vietnam is all too real. Reporters for the Toledo Blade found numerous veterans with stories as gruesome as any that Kerry relayed to Congress. And the Ohio newspaper seriously examined Kerry's comments on war crimes as the presidential candidate sought Democrats' votes in the state.

 

"As Senator Kerry geared up for Tuesday primaries in Ohio and nine other states, he told The Blade last week that he stands by what he said in 1971 - insisting his comments never portrayed all veterans as war criminals. Any suggestion of such, he said, is just political posturing by his opponents: 'They're just trying to muddy the waters here.' "

 

"Senator Kerry said last week that he never meant to blame the soldiers. 'I have stood up and consistently defended the soldiers as innocent victims of civilian policy at higher levels,' he told The Blade. He has few regrets over what he said in 1971. 'I think that occasionally there was language that might have been a little hot here and there,' he said. 'But by and large, the facts I laid out and the basic criticism of the war has been documented by countless people.' "

 

The Toledo Blade report on John Kerry and war crimes concluded: "Just one day after the end of the Winter Soldier Hearings, on a Kentucky army base, a sergeant told Army investigators about a rumor of a member of an elite paratrooper unit who had beheaded a Vietnamese baby four years earlier. That statement would launch the longest war crimes investigation of the Vietnam War, substantiate the longest-known series of atrocities by a battle unit in Vietnam, and lead to a case that would be concealed from the public for 36 years."

 

 

http://www.vvaw.org/commentary/?id=399

[Flying_Mollusk]

"Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese... Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake," Kerry said, emphasizing his call for supporting the troops by bringing them home from a hell of our creation. "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' "

 

"We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

 

I think some people just cant understand this.

[Lcyberlina]

"Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese... Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake," Kerry said, emphasizing his call for supporting the troops by bringing them home from a hell of our creation. "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' "

 

"We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

 

I think some people just cant understand this.

491712[/snapback]

 

That is the problem with people who think that supporting the troops means also supporting the war and the policies leading to such.

 

One supports the troops more when one questions the shaky reasons given for sending them to war in first place!. :mad :

[Flying_Mollusk]

I love the argument given that if you question Bush in any way, even on domestic issues or question his intelligence, you dont support our troops. Ive heard this one as recently as this year.

[Lcyberlina]

I love the argument given that if you question Bush in any way, even on domestic issues or question his intelligence, you dont support our troops. Ive heard this one as recently as this year.

491721[/snapback]

 

I know flying_mollusk, one can only practice patience.

 

BTW, do you ever read your PMs? I sent you something and you never answered.

[Flying_Mollusk]

whoops, no I always seem to miss getting those. Just responded to one you sent me.